Hippeastrum puniceum var. haywardii

Plant Life 1949
A Pink Amaryllis
Mary G. Henry
Pennsylvania


Amaryllis belladonna var Haywardii
A pink Amaryllis bloomed in the window of a well known Philadelphia florist in 1944. My daughter Josephine saw it on February 2nd and commented on it. At this season, however, red and occasionally pink Amaryllis are seen in florist shops, so I gave but a passing thought to the occurrence and promptly forgot it altogether.

Six days later, on February 8th, I happened to pass the same window when surely the term "rooted to the spot" applied to me.

The pink Amaryllis were still there, some half a dozen stalks in a vase. The flowers were a totally different pink from anything I had ever seen in an Amaryllis. The pink was a true pink of an exceedingly attractive and luscious shade. There was no tinge of magenta nor any hint of peach to mar the purity of the color.

The errands for which I went to town were forgotten. I acquired two stalks of the Amaryllis. There were two flowers on one stalk and three on the other. The well shaped flowers were large but not as large as the florists' hybrids commonly seen, and according to Ridgway the color was close to "Eosine Pink." I guessed the source whence these flowers came, as I knew that one of the officers of the Academy of Natural Sciences had recently been collecting birds in South America. Later on I learned that bulbs had been collected in Bolivia by a local bird collector. The Philadelphia ornithologist who brought them to the United States does not know if this species has as yet been identified.

My two precious stalks of this Amaryllis were kept in their box for five days until February 13th. I used the pollen on several Amaryllids then in bloom in my tiny greenhouse, keeping the stalks sprinkled in their narrow box. Suddenly an idea came to me. I placed the two stalks in a vase—there was but one flower remaining apiece—and pollinated each with the other's pollen. This was on February 13th. Slowly one of the pods swelled. As the days passed, the cut end of the stem seemed to melt away. With trepidation I saw the rot creep higher and higher towards the enlarging pod. It was a race.

The seed pod won but the stem had literally rotted away. Just two months after pollination the fat pod split open, exposing the ripe seeds.

The seeds were sown April 18th. Many of them were soft and flabby and soon disintegrated, but roots emerged from a few on April 25th. Two of the tiny bulbs lived to put out leaves on May 18th. One of these grew apace but the other dwindled away.

In February 1948, just about four years after pollination, my one bulb of the precious pink Amaryllis sent up a sturdy stalk from which expanded three enchantingly lovely flowers! (Plate 8.)

What a thrill they gave me, and how precious and beautiful they seemed after the long but exciting wait. According to Traub & Moldenke this plant is Amaryllis belladonna var. Haywardii.